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While I am not sure what may have motivated you to write the article or the newspaper to publish, some 75 years after an event that most people might view as an insignificant bit of history, I wish to personally thank you and the paper for doing so. Otherwise, I might have never learned the details of the death of Frank Patterson, who was my grandfather.

After my grandmother moved to Tampa to raise her children, the details of those days were not often discussed by her. She died in the 1950s, while I was still a child, and growing up, all I learned from her children, my father, aunt and uncles, was that he died from a shotgun blast while attempting to serve a warrant during Prohibition. Even my Uncle James Patterson, who is Frank Patterson’s last surviving child and who is a retired schoolteacher living in California, knew very few details, other than that, as he was an infant at the time.

I have shared your article with my uncle, his daughter and my own children and grandchild, and they are also grateful for your efforts in researching and writing of those events so long ago.

You might find the following a bit ironical…A fact that I never knew was that I was born in 1951 on the anniversary of his Jan. 18 death. Likewise, the fact that, after I closed my real estate and civil law practice in Tampa, in 1986, I moved to Houston,where I have since practiced law exclusively as a criminal defense attorney — something my grandfather might have looked on with displeasure.

Thank you…for your efforts as they have reached across time and space and touched more hearts, in a positive way, than you could have imagined.

Richard Steven Patterson

Click on the image to read the Jan. 19, 1930 account of the shooting as published on the front page of The Palm Beach Post.

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